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The whales are mocking us

Researchers in the US have been shocked to discover a beluga whale whose vocalisations were remarkably close to human speech.

While dolphins have been taught to mimic the pattern and durations of sounds in human speech, no animal has spontaneously tried such mimicry.

But researchers heard a nine-year-old whale named NOC make sounds octaves below normal, in clipped bursts.

They found that vocal bursts averaged about three per second, with pauses reminiscent of human speech. Analysis of the recordings showed that the frequencies within them were spread out into “harmonics” in a way very unlike whales’ normal vocalisations and more like those of humans.

So, when do they take over the world? Just look at this innocent smiling face.

Had a reference instead been made to the strangely parallel and short-lived lives of sky-diving petunias and sperm whales, we would have at least been in the ball park. However, as the topic at hand is whale singing (Adams’s whale was most certainly not singing as it fell, though the wind did whistle as it passed. That was, of course, the wind whistling and not the whale, which even if it was, is not singing; so let’s try to stay on track) and nothing to do with petunias, I maintain that a Star Trek IV reference is more true to the endless attention to completely useless minutiae that exemplifies a true geek.

Q.E.D.

Gary

October 23, 2012 at 12:20 PM

It was a whale mocking a dolphin.

RayG

October 23, 2012 at 11:11 AM

Okay, so it was Rob Brydon doing his man in a box voice of a Beluga whale doing an impression of a dolphin…